4 Friday April 8 2022 | the timescover story
As the third Fantastic Beasts film is released to fanfare and
her book sales keep booming, Andrew Billen looks at how
the Harry Potter author has toughed it out against the trolls
JK Rowling with the
Fantastic Beasts star
Eddie Redmayne in- Left: a marcher
at Trans+ Pride in
London last year
violent. Her solidarity was with
women with histories like hers who
had been “slurred as bigots for having
concerns around single-sex spaces’’.
Yet this voice proved unpopular too,
for some an elision of distinct issues or
else a plea for sympathy (which she
explicitly said it wasn’t). Perhaps it was
too clever.
Mermaids, a controversial but
well-established British charity
supporting “transgender, non-binary
and gender-diverse children” and their
families, was articulate too when we
asked for its thoughts on Rowling. It
told us: “For those people working
with trans children, young people andT
his is a big day in
JK Rowling’s
Wizarding World, or,
as it is now more
cautiously called,
simply Wizarding
World. The Secrets of
Dumbledore, the third
of the Fantastic Beasts movies that
serve as prequels to everything
Harry Potter, is finally out. The word,
including from our critic Kevin Maher,
is that the $200 million film is indeed
a fantastic beast.
It considerably raises the Harry
Potter stakes. Trailers warn us that
“the world is coming undone and the
unimaginable will seem inevitable”.
So the film is topical too, in all kinds
of ways. For one, it was unimaginable
when the first Harry Potter movie
came out in 2001 that two decades
later the Potter universe’s prime
mover, JK Rowling, would be anything
less than a secular saint, the woman
who rescued reading for a generation.
Yet Joanne Rowling is now someone
we are all expected to have an
opinion on: are we for or against her?
It was in June 2020 that Rowling’s
reputation fissured. She had tweeted a
response to a sustainable development
website’s use of the phrase “people
who menstruate”: “I’m sure,” she
teased, “there used to be a word for
those people. Someone help me out.
Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”
The jibe compounded earlier hints
on social media, hints at first
explained away by a publicist, that
on trans rights she was not on the
same page as transgender activists.
Tweet after tweet followed. The
abuse started. She did not fold. She
doubled down.
For some transgender rights activists
she was now Voldemort. The desire
that Rowling may “fit in a hearse”
became a song. Demonstrations were
held outside her home in Edinburgh.
Most (but not all) of the cast of the
Potter movies dissociated themselves
from her. A senior writer on The
Daily Telegraph, observing that her
name was all but invisible on a Secrets
of Dumbledore trailer, concluded that
she had been cancelled. Vladimir
Putin declared himself outraged;
Rowling indicated her
gratitude with the hashtag
#IStandWithUkraine.
The outrage has been
extreme, and some of it
performative, but beneath the
animus lies a quieter sadness.
The Leaky Cauldron, once
Rowling’s favourite Harry Potter
fan site, has since July 2020
refused to cover her activities,
will not quote her if it can help
it and cannot bear to have her
picture on its pages.
Emma Pocock, its former
senior editor, now running a
coffee shop in London, is no
longer involved. She says she
does not see Rowling as
Voldemort but her refusal to
hear out people who know orwork with transgender people seemed
dangerous. And trans people are
Harry Potter fans too. “There’s a lot
of marginalised people in the Harry
Potter community because it’s a space
where people did come to feel safe,”
Pocock says. “It just feels so different
now. She’s completely tainted the
experience of it for a lot of fans.”
The about-turn from quasi-fanatical
devotion to, at best, sorrow and, at
worst, demonisation is a twist worthy
of the fictional saga itself. It is an
almost parental rejection. Many will
surely look back on this time as their
transitional moment from child to
adult. But was what was once
“unimaginable” also, in retrospect,
“inevitable”?
Rowling rarely meets the press
these days, but during her early rise
the Times journalist Ann Treneman
interviewed her three times. First in
1997, when sales had reached 30,000,
then again in 2000, when they stood
at 30 million. Rowling, she recorded,
had survived a bad marriage, broughtup a child on her own, written in cafés
in the crevices of her days and been
rejected by publisher after publisher.
In 2000, she noted, Rowling’s one
extravagance had been to buy herself
an aquamarine ring. She called it her
“No One Is Grinding Me Down Ring”.
“I mean,” Treneman says now,
“Joanne was always a bit ‘no bullshit’.
And it had to be that way because
Harry Potter was kind of too big, too
big for the world really.”
In their last interview, in 2003,
Rowling said that after her fourth
book, The Goblet of Fire, she had taken
almost a year’s break from writing to
process everything that had happened.
For a while, she admitted, she had not
been coping, but Rowling eventuallyShe was always
‘no bullshit’. She
had to be. Harry
Potter was too big
tamed this thing that was too big for
the world, the fantastic beast of her
fame. She used it so that it served the
causes she cared about, sometimes
with money — to Refuge, for instance,
a charity helping victims of domestic
violence — and sometimes, as now,
with her opinions.
“One of the things I’m hoping
you’re going to chart,” Treneman says,
“is that Joanne has really found her
public voice. She will always be a
writer but I think she’s worked very
hard to get this other voice working.
Now she’s found her voice as a person,
and she really tells it like she sees it.
She tweeted something today about
bearded men and it was hilarious.”
Tuesday’s tweet read: “To the many
bearded men in my mentions who
seem to think the loss of their
approval is a mortal blow: it’s like
being told I’ve lost a space hopper.”
The bearded men presumably
referred to Corbynistas, for whom this
Gordon Brown Labourite has little
time. There ensued a satisfying debate
on the merits of the kangaroo-eared
bouncing balls ridden by kids in the
Seventies. There is a joy to Rowling’s
sallies.
“What I love about her,” Treneman
continues, “is she doesn’t seem to
care what people think, and that must
be very freeing for her, because I think
she did care for a long time what
people thought of her.”
Rowling is 56 now. The children
who were her first readers are in their
late thirties. Many may share her
intellectual irritation when they hear
biological sex playing second fiddle to
the theory of gender identity. They
may admire, as I do, the wit of her
social media posts, her refusal to be
“ground down”.
Her present-day teenage readers
have a voice of their own too, however.
It is almost instinctively respectful of
difference and their right to declare
who they are. Reservations, they are
politely expressed. A month ago on
International Women’s Day, Rowling
tweeted: “Apparently, under a Labour
government, today will become We
Who Must Not Be Named Day.” “You
have no idea how much harm you are
doing,” someone replied.
Nothing Rowling tweets
is actually evidence of
transphobia, certainly not
in its literal sense of a
morbid fear of transgender
people. Nor is her sarcasm
the only public voice she
has applied to the debate.
In a piece in The Sunday
Times in June 2020 Rowling
attempted a conciliatory
tone, praising the writing
of young “trans men” as
revealing “a group of
notably sensitive and clever
people”. Nevertheless, the
article was mainly a defence
of biologically born women
in the “most misogynistic
period” she had experienced.
Her first marriage had beenis
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HExpelliarmus! Why JK Rowling